Thursday, February 16, 2006

In addition to getting into the sale of traditional media, including on-page advertising in magazines, Google is also considering creating a "backchannel" way of measuring the ads' effectiveness. This could involve putting URLs into text or print ads and driving readers back to Google in some way whereby their exposure to the ad's message could be tallied. The outcome of such a system might be that only ads for which a reader was willing to go to the trouble of clicking back, as it were, would be measured and regarded as effective, regardless of their actual effectiveness in building brand awareness or sales traffic. Booga-booga.